Tea Party Leaders See Movement Becoming a Potent Force

As the Tea Party movement approaches its first “birthday”, the leadership is taking it to new levels. The metamorphosis, which has been deliciously organic, has seen it go from street protests, to active demonstrations to serious political action. All along the way, Big Media and Big Political Parties have failed to truly grasp what it is all about. As Missouri lawmaker, Chris Kelly once famously said to another during Floor debate, “I can explain it to you, but I cannot understand it for you”.

At the end of the month, Richard Viguerie — legendary conservative activist, direct response fundraising pioneer, and currently chairman of ConservativeHQ.com — will deliver the keynote speech at the inaugural Leadership Tea Party training event to be held at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Westin Hotel. In addition to Mr. Viguerie’s keynote speech delivered on Friday night January 29, the event will consist of 11 sessions of grassroots leadership training over 14 hours on Saturday and Sunday, January 30-31. Mr. Viguerie’s speech is free and open to both the press and the public, though a limited number of seats are available. (You can request a ticket online here .)

Viguerie, who was hired by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1962 as the director of Young Americans for Freedom, worked for the Goldwater campaign in 1964, pioneered the direct response fund raising techniques that financed the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and has been a key leader in the movement for limited government for decades. Tea Party activists of varying levels of political experience, most rigorously eschewing party labels, are hungry to learn the tactics to win on the political battlefield. Like latter day militia men, the Tea Party activists have seen the whites of the eyes of the red coats reds, and they are trading their microsoft office suite applications for html and eblogger and are training in the dark political arts for the battle that will shape their Country for the sake of their children.

The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition is by design, a loose, informal collaborative federation of thirty local tea party leaders from around the country who meet quarterly to discuss strategic and tactical issues. Ken Emanuelson, one of the leaders of the Dallas Tea Party, which is one of the local tea parties that form the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, is the spokesperson of the inaugural Leadership Tea Party event.

Featured instructors and panelists at the event will include Michael Patrick Leahy, author of Rules for Conservative Radicals, Eric Odom, founder of the American Liberty Alliance, and Bill Hennessy, author of Zen Conservatism and co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party. A link to the full roster of the speakers and additional details can be found here.

So the Tea Party movement is here to stay. And politicians take note. It is not about Republicans or Democrats or starting third parties. As Emanuelson explains. “The mainstream media has gotten the Tea Party Movement wrong. It’s not about the various national organizations, or even purported national leaders. It’s about the thousands of local tea party organizations that are loosely collaborating to return limited Constitutional Government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility to the United States“. So the Party that delivers candidates that meet those standards will reap the rewards of a massive pool of well-trained new recruits. If you cannot understand that, well, we cannot understand it for you.